hola! comosta, cachai?

so my spanish is finally starting to progress.... one month into this trip and i'm finally starting to understand people, at least a little bit. also, it helps if i'm listening to the gringos speak spanish because they talk slower and have the same accent i do. i definitely don't understand most of the words but i'm starting to recognize the ones i hear a lot and once i figure out what they mean, i can slowly figure out the gist of what people are saying. helps if they use their hands a lot when they talk too..... as far as speaking spanish goes, i still totally suck. the cool thing is that i'm able to remember words a lot better. i had to mail a letter to the states so i looked up how to say 'i need to mail a letter' in spanish. the verb 'to mail' is enviar. and although i only used it once, i can still remember it! which may not sound like a big deal to all of you out there that can speak more than one language, but i have a hard enough time with english so it's pretty cool to see that i'm actually remembering some of the stuff i'm learning! paul told me about a website, freerice.com. you can set it up so it gives you spanish words and you have to select what they mean. every right answer you get, they donate 10 grains of rice to hungry people. so you can learn new words and help people at the same time! rad! hoping that in another month, i'll actually be able to say some spanish or at least get over the fear of not being able to understand anything. it's really easy to say 'i don't understand' and then realize that i wasn't even trying to catch any of the words they're saying. every day i get a little bit better.....

one of the funniest things i'm figuring out is how abbreviated all the spanish is. i was shocked when i got down here and couldn't understand anything, because i really did study before i left and i thought i knew at least some basic vocabulary and sayings. what i've come to realize is that no one here speaks the same spanish i was learning. so a great example is 'como estas'. for those of you non-spanish speaking folks, that means 'how are you'. but here they don't say 'como estas'. they say 'comosta'. all of the words run together so you can't tell that there's more than one word spoken and they really don't like s here so any word that ends in s is abbreviated. sometimes they just say 'como' and somehow you're supposed to know that they're actually saying 'como estas'. and that's just one example..... they also like to throw in random words. all of the girls say cachai. it's slang that sorta translates into 'you know' and it pretty much takes the place of 'like' if you're a valley girl. so if you walk behind a group of girls you'll hear blah blah cachai blah blah blah cachai blah cachai blah blah blah cachai. guys use a slightly more interesting one. they like to end their sentences with 'huevon'. now, anyone that's ever had huevos rancheros (yum!!!) knows that huevo is spanish for egg. here, huevo also refers to a part of the male anatomy that closely resembles an egg. huevon can mean a lot of things - if you call your friend a huevon, you're calling him your buddy. if you call your enemy a huevon, you're calling him a really dirty word. and if you throw the word huevon onto the end of all of your sentences, you're just using the male version of the word cachai. as you can tell, i have yet to learn any spanish that actually means anything, but i'm totally learning all of my chilean slang, cachai?

i could go on and on - there's all sorts of interesting things i'm picking up. but it's late and tomorrow is my friday and then i've got two days off, woop woop! so till then, chao (they don't ever say adios here - only chao). or as a lot of people like to say, chao chao because really why would you only want to say goodbye once? so chao chao my friends - see you on the flipside! :)